The king of melody

Some are destined to be on earth much before their time, their
glory to be sung many years after they are gone. Madan Mohan is
one such, ruminates RATNA RAJAIAH.

``A great musical warrior of all times. The pretty soldiers of
film industry, who could not match musical notes with him,
defeated him by politics. But today they swear by his melody.'' A
fan on the Internet

THERE ARE fans and there are fans. Those who pray in the sanctum
sanctorum, so steeped in the lore about the object of their
adoration, seeking to know every tiny mote, every shade so much
so that they, very often, know more about their idol than perhaps
the deity itself. I, not one of those, sat outside the temple, on
the edges along with millions of other such devotees, not knowing
why or how this man touched my untutored heart, not understanding
which soaring note, which shade of his musical genius softly
played my soul, just knowing that each time I listened to his
music, some strange, wonderful magic made something inside me
stir, then soar and take wing... And that was enough. The first
time I came across Madan Mohan was in a college in Calcutta,
three years after his death. As I sat in a friend's room one day,
a beautiful song played from the little tape recorder that today
we would have scornfully called a dabba. Not even the tinny, mono
playback of that dabba (though we didn't think so at the time!)
could ruin the sweet, sensuous beauty of that song...

``Ek haseen shyam ko dil mera kho gaya.

Pehle apna hua karta tha, ab kisi ka ho gaya.''

It was a time when the first generation of yuppies was being
made, amongst whom it was becoming unfashionable to be a Hindi
film fan but I recognised a few things about the song. Mainly
that the velvet voice that could melt your bones was Rafi's. More
than that? I knew my friend's father was a well-known music
director in Hindi films called Madan Mohan. Did I connect him
with the song? Dimly, maybe. And so, in the space of those two
years, knowingly but unknowingly I stumbled on Madan Mohan
again...

And once again, when the lonely, golden aching of a saxophone
poured into the stillness of the night and I wondered what it
would be like to love someone like that...

The songs stayed with me like memories, bobbing up every now and
then like an unexpected bonus down the river of life that had now
quickened to head towards the falls... The next time Madan Mohan
touched my life was many, many years later, when I had the
privilege to work on a television show called Meri Awaz Suno,
(produced by his son, Sanjeev Kohli), a show that was a search
for future playback singing talent. It ran for three years and in
those three years, whenever we worked in the editing studio to
``embellish'' the songs with photographs of the original singers
and music composers, time and time again I would come across a
face that could have easily been that of a matinee idol, with a
quirky smile that mocked the world, as if to say, ``jab unhe
humse pyar hi na raha, roye kya, intezaar hi na raha.''

If one went purely by the number of singers who, in the 160-odd
episodes that we shot, chose to sing Madan Mohan's songs, you'd
think that he had been one of the most successful composers of
his time. Alas, the facts pointed to something very different.
Madan Mohan's career as a music composer spanned a quarter of a
century, from 1950 to 1975. During those 25 years, he composed
close to 700 songs for over 100 films, which works out to an
average of about four films a year, making him one of the most
prolific composers of Hindi cinema. (In 1959 and 1964, he
composed for eight films in each year!)

Madan Mohan died on July 14, 1975. His son Sanjeev Kohli recalls
that his body was carried on the shoulders of Amitabh Bachchan,
Vinod Khanna, Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna and Rajendra Kumar and
when a photograph of this hit the newspapers the next morning, he
says that he became more popular in college than he had ever been
when his father was alive - because they suddenly realised the
worth of the dead man by the men who were his pallbearers...

All of which makes all tributes and accolades including this one,
the ultimate, painful irony. But some of us - and there are many
such in the history of great men and women - are called to be on
this earth much before our times, our glory to blaze many, many
years after we are gone. Madan Mohan was one such and I write
this tribute as perhaps a tiny attempt to make amends...

And I should thank Sanjeev Kohli without whose help this would
not have been possible.

A strange thing happens when you mention Madan Mohan's
compositions - you almost never need to mention the films or the
stars. For two reasons. One, because the films are often so
obscure that it doesn't matter. Madan Mohan never worked on a
Dilip Kumar film, his two films with Dev Anand - ``Pocketmaar''
and ``Sharabi'' - were both flops, so too with Raj kapoor in
``Ashiana'' and ``Dhoon'' and Rajesh Khanna in ``Bawarchi''. When
he did get some of the other ``big names'' - Meena kumari
(``Memsaab''), Nutan (``Aakhri Dao,'' ``Dulhan ek Raat ki''),
Nargis (``Adalat''), Dharmendra - (``Neela Akash'', ``Anpadh'',
``Aap ki Parchaiyan'', ``Pooja ke Phool''), even Amitabh Bachchan
in his second film ``Parwana'' (where he played villain to Navin
Nischol's hero!) - it was either before they became stars or the
films themselves flopped.

But there is a second more important reason why the credits of
the film are unnecessary. Because the songs themselves are so
well-known, standing on their own as immortal compositions, that
nothing else matters. In Hindi cinema, in the triumvirate of
music composer, singer and lyricist, the norm is that the
composer and his tune are paramount. Except in the case of Madan
Mohan. For whom it was the final song and what it sought to
convey that was paramount and which he created and nurtured like
one does a child, suffering as much heartbreak and agony as
parenthood brings. Innumerable stories abound about how he toiled
at perfecting a song, how he made the singer (including his
beloved Lata) sing again and again, how he railed at the
musicians (smashing a studio glass partition once, shouting,
``Besharmon, besura bajate ho!'), working with the lyricist to
write and rewrite till he was perfectly satisfied with the song.
(He composed ten tunes for ``Dil dhoondta hai'' in Mausam before
he was satisfied with the final one.) Which is why it's almost
never that you'll find a Madan Mohan song where the music and the
instrumentation do not mesh perfectly. Listen carefully to
``Nainon mein pyar dole'' (Lata - Sheroo - 1957) and you will
find that underlining the delightful melody are little trilling
pieces of flute with which you can almost imagine the heroine's
feet skipping happily as she thinks ``tumhe jab dekhoon piya,
mera sansaar dole...''

Madan Mohan songs have some of the most exquisite pieces of sitar
(from ``Meri yaad mein tum na'' Talat-Madhosh-1951 to ``Jaiye
humse khafa ho gaye'' Lata - ``Chalbaaz'' - 1980), but not once
is it ever out of the emotional context of the song. Even when,
later on, he dared to use western instrumentation (the exquisite
saxophone interludes in ``Mushkil hai jeena Lata-``Sahib
Bahadur'' 1977), even western rhythms in ghazals and nagmas,
(Chirag dil ka jaalao, Woh bhuli dastaan and Betaab dil ki in
which he used only western rhythms and no tabla!), it seemed the
most natural thing to do, never jarring, out of place or even
remotely self- conscious.

And which is why it is such agony to mention a Madan Mohan song
the way it is done usually, by quoting the first line. Because
you cannot just stop at that, but want to go on the next and next
and the next... till you find that it is the entire song. You are
awestruck not just at the originality of expression, but at the
way the words have been crafted so that the singer and the song
flow across them like a river, never once stumbling or
tripping...

Across his 700 songs, Madan Mohan worked mainly with just two
lyricists - Rajinder Krishan, Raja Mehdi Ali Khan - both his
friends and with whom he composed not tunes to which words were
written but seamless song entities where you could not make out
which came first - the words or the music. (Majrooh Sultanpuri
and Kaifi Azmi were the other two lyricists who worked with Madan
Mohan, largely in the later years, Kaifi Azmi for all Chetan
Anand films. Sahir Ludhianvi worked with Madan Mohan in just
three films, including Laila Majnu). And so it would not be too
much to say that perhaps to no one more than to Madan Mohan fits
the title of ``music director'', because his baton brought
together the melody, the singer and the words in one perfect
moment of harmony.....

Ghazal king. A title befittingly bestowed upon someone who ruled
a genre where few have managed to take the intricate craft of a
ghazal and infuse it with the sweet intensity of emotion the way
Madan Mohan did. (In fact, very often you realise that a Madan
Mohan song is a ghazal much later on, knowing it initially as a
sad or happy song.) But when you examine Madan Mohan's body of
work beyond the ghazals, there emerges an astonishing breadth of
musical expression. For example, he was one of the earliest to
blend Western influences into his work, and that too, well before
``Tum jo mil gaye ho'' for Hanste Zakhm which he composed just
two years before he died in 1973. Listen to his ``Zameen se Hamen
Aasman pe'' (Asha Bhosle/ Mohd Rafi - Adalat 1958), actually a
ghazal, but enchantingly set to a waltz rhythm or to the fabulous
surprises of the saxophone interlude in the exquisitely
traditional ``Sapnon mein agar'' (Lata - Dulhan ek raat ki -
1966).

Madan Mohan also created some of the most beautiful light,
romantic songs like the early Talat-Lata duets ``Yeh nai nai
preet hai'' (Pocketmaar 1956), ``Teri chamakti aankhon se''
(Chote Babu 1959) or the charming ``Dil unko uthake de diya''
(Lata-Baap Bete 1959), or Rafi's sweetly drunken ``Kabhi na
Kabhi'' (Sharabi 1964) or the perky ``Simti si sharmayi si''
(Kishore Kumar - Parwana - 1971) or the utterly lilting Lata-
Manna Dey duet ``Bheegi chandni...'' (Suhagan - 1964) or the two
Asha sizzlers, ``Thodi Der Ke Liye Mere Ho Jaao'' (Akeli Mat
Jaiyo - 1963) and ``Shokh nazar ki bijliyan'' (Woh Kaun Thi).
Somehow these seemed to fade, giving way to maybe the more well-
known, equally beautiful but often brooding shades that dominated
his later work. I wonder if this in some way was a reflection of
his frustration.

And then of course there was ``Bawarchi''. Hrishikesh Mukherjee
and Rajesh Khana's only film with Madan Mohan, but that was not
what was unique but the fact that all the songs in the film were
completely situational, from the exquisite ``More Naina Bahayen
Neer'' and the classic Manna De hit ``Tum bin jeevan'' to the
astounding ``Bhor Aayi Gaya Andhiyara'' which unfolds like a
musical play with everyone from Manna De, Kishore Kumar to -
belive it or not - Govinda's mother, Nirmala Devi, singing in it!

Madan Mohan and Lata Mangeshkar. Names that are often considered
synonyms for each other. One was a man who said he would not have
composed so much if Lata Mangeshkar had not been there to sing
it. The other who said, ``Other composers gave me `Gaane' while
Madan bhaiyya gave me `Gaana' to sing. The only other singer who
sang nearly as often for Madan Mohan was Mohammed Rafi and to a
lesser extent, Talat Mohmood. Yet, even with the singers who sang
rarely for him, Madan Mohan's compositions for them became some
of their greatest hits. No more for anyone else, than Asha
Bhosle. With Madan Mohan she sang one of her biggest hits to
date, ``Jhumka gira re''. But that apart, he gave her a clutch of
songs that made her sound her sweetest, most poignant, something
that few composers made her do. (``Saba se yeh keh do'',
``Humsafar saath'', and Jaane kya haal where you almost do not
recognise her as the usual sensuous, theeki Asha.) Geeta Dutt
sang just a handful of numbers with Madan Mohan and yet ``Ae dil
mujhe bata de'' (Fifty-Fifty) became one of her all-time hits.
The best-loved Talat numbers were Madan Mohan compositions
(``Meri yaad mein tumna'', ``Phir wohi shyam'', ``Humse aaya na
gaya'', ``Main teri nazar ka saroor hoon''). Even Mukesh who
rarely sang for Madan Mohan had ``Bhooli hui Yaaden'' and the
enchanting ``Hum Chal Rahe the'' as did Kishore Kumar with the
wonderfully comic ``Zaroorat hai''.